The reported health effects of drinking alcohol are varied, with clear deleterious effects of heavy drinking on the brain, liver, and other organ systems, and some suggestion of benefit at low levels of consumption.

Little previous research has targeted the impact of moderate drinking on the brain, and findings have been inconsistent. The goal of this observational cohort study was to examine the association of moderate alcohol consumption with brain structure and function.
From 1985 to 2015, 550 community dwelling adult participants in the UK Whitehall II cohort imaging substudy underwent repeated measurements of cognitive performance and weekly alcohol intake, as well as multimodal MRI at study endpoint. At baseline, mean age was 43.0 ± 5.4 years, and no participants were alcohol-dependent, on the basis of the CAGE screening questionnaire. Incomplete or poor-quality MRI or clinical data or gross structural abnormality led to exclusion of 23 participants.
In a dose-dependent manner, higher alcohol consumption was associated with increased risk for hippocampal atrophy during the 30-year follow-up, after adjustment for confounding factors that included age, sex, education, social class, physical and social activity, smoking, stroke risk, and medical history.
Compared with abstainers, participants who drank more than 30 units/week had the highest risk (odds ratio [OR], 5.8; 95% confidence interval, 1.8 to 18.6; P ≤ .001). Even moderate drinkers (14 to < 21 units/week in men; 14 units was equivalent to four pints of strong beer or five large glasses of wine) had more than threefold the risk for right-sided hippocampal atrophy compared with abstainers (OR, 3.4; 95% CI, 1.4 to 8.1; P = .007), Light drinking (1 to < 7 units/week) did not protect against hippocampal atrophy.
Other risks associated with higher alcohol consumption were differences in corpus callosum microstructure, reduced gray-matter density, reduced white-matter microstructural integrity, and faster decline in lexical fluency, but there were no associations with cross-sectional cognitive performance at the time of MRI or longitudinal changes in semantic fluency or word recall.
study limitations include the observational design, which precludes causal inferences; a possible lack of generalizability; and possible bias. However, these limitations are offset by major strengths, including long-term data on alcohol intake, detailed information on confounding variables, a large amount of MRI data, and advanced methods of imaging analysis.
The findings suggest that even moderate alcohol drinking is associated with threefold risk for atrophy in the hippocampus (a key region for memory and spatial navigation) and other adverse brain outcomes. Moderate alcohol drinking has not previously been linked to hippocampal atrophy. Associations of alcohol intake with compromised white-matter integrity in this study also suggest potential threats to cognitive efficiency.
These findings have important potential public health implications, supporting recent UK guidelines recommending lower alcohol intake and raising concerns regarding current limits recommended in US guidelines. The latter suggest that up to 24.5 units/week is safe for men, but this study showed a threefold increase in risk for hippocampal atrophy at only 14-21 units/week. In this study, nearly one half of the men and one quarter of the women were "moderate" drinkers.
This study showed no protective effect of light drinking over abstinence. Earlier reports claiming such a protective effect might have been limited by confounding if light drinking was associated with higher social class or IQ.
As life span increases, preserving quality of life will depend on maintaining cognitive function, which declines with increasing age. Alcohol drinking may be a modifiable risk factor for cognitive impairment, if primary prevention efforts begin in early adulthood or sooner. In light of these findings, justifying drinking habits that are regarded as normal or even as beneficial may no longer be rational.

Support us when you shop for your everyday needs. Go to smile.amazon.com/ch/20-0848166 and Amazon donates to Recovery Radio Network Inc. When you use this link Amazon will donate a portion of your proceeds to the Recovery Radio Network at no cost to you.This way you get to take advantage of Amazon’s great selection and pricing and support RRN at the same time! So if you ever shop Amazon please use this link and help us out.

The Recovery Radio Network has become a partner with Stitcher Radio. As one of the worlds largest podcast aggregators, Stitcher has thousands of podcasts in it’s library and millions of listeners. We are proud to be part of the family. This will make us available to a much larger audience and will simplify people finding us. This move optimizes our stream for mobile platforms and saves us the expense of developing our own app. If you prefer to listen to Recovery Radio on your mobile device I recommend you go to your favorite App store and download the Stitcher App. Once it is installed you can search for “Recovery Radio network” and add it to your list of favorites. This will automatically connect you to the world of Recovery on the Recovery Radio Network and you will receive every new episode directly on your mobile device or your vehicle’s sound system if it came equipped with Stitcher as many new vehicles do. We are excited about this new opportunity and hope it helps us reach even more people.

Acetaminophen/hydrocodone, the opioid pain reliever commonly sold under the brand name Vicodin, was the most dispensed prescription medicine in 2007.
And 2008. And 2009. And every year after through 2013, according to the QuintilesIMS Institute, which tracks medicine use and spending.
Then, in 2014, this staple of the opioid abuse epidemic fell to second place behind levothyroxine, which treats hypothyroidism. By 2016, acetaminophen/hydrocodone was the fourth most prescribed drug in the nation, with the volume of prescriptions down 7.2% from 2015 and 34% from 2012.
This downhill story helps capture a trend for pain medications in general and the clinicians who prescribe them. The volume of dispensed prescriptions for all pain meds has decreased for 2 straight years now, falling 2.7% in 2015, and 1.7% in 2016, QuintilesIMS reports in its annual review of medicine use and spending, which was released today. Pain meds include both narcotic and non-narcotic analgesics as well as muscle relaxants and topical pain treatments.
The study attributes the decline to more controls placed on pain meds in response to the opioid abuse epidemic. These controls include more stringent prescribing guidelines in recent years, particularly a set issued for primary care in March 2016 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC cautioned that opioids are not first-line therapy for chronic pain, and that clinicians initially should consider nonopioid pain relievers and nonmedicine options such as exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy. When clinicians do prescribe opioids, they should start patients off at the lowest dose possible and limit treatment for acute pain to no more than 7 days. In addition, clinicians should monitor patients to ensure the drugs are helping with pain and function without inflicting harm.
“The CDC guidelines have been very powerful in changing physician behavior because they’ve had a larger audience,” said Steven Stanos, DO, president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine.
Media and political attention paid to the tragedy of opioid overdose deaths also has made physicians more judicious in their prescribing habits, said Dr Stanos, medical director of pain services at the Swedish Health System in Seattle, Washington. At the same time, he said, physicians are catching on to therapies that complement or replace opioids in pain management — everything from counseling and yoga to spinal cord stimulation.
“We’ll continue to see a reduction in opioid prescriptions,” Dr Stanos predicted.

In 2016 over 64,000 people died in the US from overdoses, most of them from opioids. That’s more Americans than were killed in the entire 20 years of the Vietnam war!
In addition to that, more than 88,000 people died in alcohol related deaths in the same year! The result is that the healthcare infrastructure and associated public services are overwhelmed. Underfunded as always, they are currently beginning to break down under the increased load.
The good news is that there are several million people in recovery from Alcoholism and Substance Abuse. People leading normal productive lives, raising families and contributing to their communities.
That’s where we come in. The Recovery Radio Network has been providing Peer Support for Alcoholics, Addicts and, the people who love them since 2004. We provide materials to support people in their efforts to recover from Alcoholism, Substance Abuse, and Co-dependency In 2017 more than 450,000 people logged into our online blog reading the articles and connecting to resources for help. And,our audio podcasts delivered over 1,600,000 hours of support to the recovery community this year.
As you might imagine this is expensive to maintain and that’s why I am writing you. Please help us continue to provide the same level of care we have in the past. As the recovery community grows so do the demands on our resources and we need your help to keep up.

The late Todd Graham, MD, in South Bend, Indiana, was primarily a physiatrist, and devoted only a small portion of his practice to pain management. According to his best friend, Dr Graham was trying to phase out of pain management completely because of how the opioid abuse epidemic had changed that field over the years.

“Patients have become more difficult,” said A. J. Mencias, MD,”A lot of them don’t react so well when you deny them opioid painkillers.”
Sometimes relatives of pain patients who hear the word ‘no’ don’t react so well either, which happened to Dr Graham, a popular 56-year-old physician. He was shot to death on July 26 by the husband of a patient whose request for opioid painkillers he denied earlier that day. The patient’s husband, Michael Jarvis, then took his own life.
Dr Graham’s murder highlights the risk for physical violence faced by pain-management physicians, particularly as they and others come under increasing pressure to avoid prescribing opioids for chronic pain. The extent of that risk is a matter of study and conjecture. In a survey of members of the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians (ASIPP) published in Pain Medicine in 2015, 52% said patients had threatened them, usually in the context of opioid medications, and 7% of the threats involved a gun. Sixty-five percent of ASIPP members have had to call security. Almost 3% reported being injured by a patient. And 8% said they carry a gun for protection.
Whether pain-management physicians say the ASIPP survey underestimates or overestimates the problem of belligerent and sometimes violent patients, the specialty nevertheless has its guard up, training clinicians on how to de-escalate angry confrontations and developing strategies to avoid them in the first place. The risk, in short, is real, said Edward Michna, MD, who serves on the board of directors of the American Pain Society (APS).

Tracked Down in the Parking Lot

At the time of his death, Dr Graham practiced at South Bend Orthopaedics, where he was a partner. He took a multimodal approach toward pain management, relying on everything from physical therapy to antidepressants, said Dr Mencias. “He believed in opioids for short-term therapy.”
Dr Graham, he said, had an excellent bedside manner, and patients’ reviews posted on the South Bend Orthopaedics website seem to bear that out. “Dr Graham…has always been very good at explaining my problems, answering my questions and explaining the treatments,” one patient wrote. “This is done with a pleasant, friendly demeanor and interest.” His patient satisfaction score was 4.3 out of 5. A few patients commented that Dr Graham seemed in a rush, although others said he took his time.
Outside of medicine, Dr Graham lived a full life. He and his wife Julie raised money for charities like a local center for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and he consulted with the University of Notre Dame’s athletic department on a volunteer basis. He skied. He played golf. He vacationed in Switzerland, southern France, and St Barthélemy Island in the Caribbean.
On July 26, Dr Graham had an appointment with the wife of 48-year-old Michael Jarvis, who accompanied her. Jarvis also was in chronic pain, and unemployed, according to St Joseph County (Indiana) Prosecuting Attorney Ken Cotter.
It wasn’t the couple’s first visit with Dr Graham. They had been in his office about a month before, with the wife seeking relief for chronic pain, Cotter told Medscape Medical News.
Dr Graham declined to prescribe opioid painkillers at that time, sparking a “strong disagreement” with Michael Jarvis, said Cotter. “He didn’t like the answers.”
The same scene played out on July 26. Dr Graham turned down the wife’s request for opioid painkillers, explaining that they weren’t appropriate for her chronic pain. “She understood, and didn’t want them either,” Cotter said about the conclusion of the second visit. “But [the husband] was insistent.”
The couple left, only for the husband to return to the office 2 hours later with a semiautomatic handgun. He intercepted Dr Graham as he was driving to an adjacent rehabilitation center and exchanged words with him. Jarvis followed Dr Graham and shot him twice in the head in a parking lot after the physician stepped out of his vehicle. Jarvis then drove to a friend’s house, where he committed suicide.
According to Cotter, there’s no evidence to suggest that Jarvis’ wife was involved in her husband’s murderous plan, or knew about it. “She’s suffering, too,” he said in a news conference shortly after the shooting.

“I Know Where You Live”

By all accounts, when a physician denies a request for opioid painkillers, hostile responses usually come from the patient, not a relative. Either way, the responses can be unnerving.
“Anybody who practices pain medicine has been threatened,” said Dr Michna, also an anesthesiologist and pain specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. “I’ve received notes saying, ‘I know where you live and that you have children.’ ”
Sometimes ire is sparked when a physician ends someone’s opioid therapy after discovering that the patient is taking illicit drugs as well. Another potentially combustible situation arises when a long-time prescriber of opioid painkillers retires, and a younger replacement tries to wean patients off the drugs. The risk for belligerent behavior, threats, and violence reflects the demographics of patients in pain, according to Dr Michna and others.
“Close to 70% of pain patients have psychological comorbidities, like addictive behavior,” he said. “Many have been in prison. They’re desperate.”
To Dr Michna, the ASIPP finding that 52% of pain-management physicians have been threatened seems low. In contrast, Joanna Katzman, MD, MSPH, president of the Academy of Integrative Pain Management (AIPM), thinks the figure is too high, especially in light of her own experience. Dr Katzman directs the University of New Mexico Pain Center in Albuquerque.
“We have no violence whatsoever,” said Dr Katzman, a professor of neurology at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, in an interview with Medscape Medical News. “Verbal threats are very rare.”
She credits the peaceful atmosphere to patients knowing that her pain center does not prescribe opioids on the first visit, and that these drugs are far down on the list of possible treatments, which are interdisciplinary in nature. “If all this is laid out from the beginning, there are not unmet expectations,” Dr Katzman said.
Dr Michna at the APS agrees with that approach, saying that it has lowered the level of conflict and anger at his hospital. “Be upfront and mitigate false expectations,” he said.

Just Don’t Take Away Something

Another key to averting blowups over opioids is caring communication with patients, said Steve Stanos, DO, president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine.
For one thing, busy physicians need to stop looking at the clock and take time to explain why a patient is not a candidate for opioid therapy, Dr Stanos told Medscape Medical News. But the length of the conversation is not enough.
“You need to build rapport with patients, and win their trust,” said Dr Stanos, medical director of pain services at the Swedish Health System in Seattle, Washington. “When you don’t prescribe them opioid painkillers, you want to be seen as someone who’s looking out for their best interests instead of taking something away from them.”
What’s valuable with pain patients is motivational interviewing, in which the physician helps the patient in a nonconfrontational way to examine self-defeating behaviors and find the inner motivation to change them. “You want patients to manage themselves,” said Dr Stanos.
A pain-management physician can do all the right things, however, and still have a patient raise his or her voice, face reddening, hands waving. A bit of venting is tolerable, but at some point, a clinician may need to defuse the situation by bringing another person — a behavioral health expert, say — into the discussion, said Dr Stanos. Sometimes Dr Stanos will leave the room momentarily to let the patient decompress, and mull over what he’s said. And sometimes he announces that he will end the interview in so many minutes, and offer to make a follow-up appointment.
Of course, it may boil down to calling security, or the police. Threats of physical violence can’t be tolerated, said the AIPM’s Dr Katzman. Even at the University of New Mexico Pain Center, where threats are rare, staff get periodic training on how to handle a volatile patient. Krishna Chari, PsyD, a clinical psychologist at the center who has coached colleagues on emergency responses, said that a physician can simply tell the patient, “I don’t feel safe” and leave the room.

Packed Funeral Service

South Bend Orthopaedics closed its doors on July 26 shortly after Dr Graham’s murder, and stayed closed the next day. The group practice shut down again on July 31, the day of Dr Graham’s funeral.
Hundreds of mourners, including many patients, filled St Pius X Catholic Church in Granger, Indiana. Dr Mencias recalled how Dr Graham and his electric personality “lit up a room like the sky on the Fourth of July.” Travis Graham, MD, one of Dr Graham’s three adult children and an anesthesiology resident, said in a statement that he had planned to join his father as a physician in South Bend. “I hope I can be the kind of doctor he can be proud of,” the son said.
Dr Mencias said resuming work at the orthopedics practice has been surreal.
“All of my partners and I are nervous,” he said. “You hope that Dr Graham’s murder is a once-in-a-lifetime incident.”
Even so, just a few days after the shooting, a local emergency-department physician was threatened by a patient after he turned down a request for opioid pain medicine, according to Dr Mencias. This time around, no harm came to the physician, and the patient was arrested.